The current issue of The New Yorker has a well-developed article by David Owen (subscription needed to read the whole article) on the dilemma of efficiency improvements in energy usage. The phrase, more efficient, sounds at first like something that always should be good for us. The dilemma is that this is not always true is a paradox. Don’t more efficient automobiles get more miles to the gallon? Isn’t this the definition of efficiency? The answer is yes to both. What could be bad about that? The hitch is that the potential savings are spent on doing more with the… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Commodification of College Degrees
The national news tonight featured a story about college cheating. It was not the usual talk about plagiarism, but rather about the prevalence of paying for “original” papers. The story featured “Ed,” who has been making a very good living composing student papers on just about any subject. Ed counts his output over the years in the thousands. Finding a source of papers is about as easy as buying a textbook on Amazon, the newscast asserts. Ed claims to get much of his input for the papers through Google searches and from Amazon book extracts. How lazy can the students… Read More
Continue ReadingLooking for the Christmas Spirit
Christmas season is always a time of contrasts. The Holy versus the commercial. The pious versus the semi- and non-believers. Bach and Handel’s magnificent liturgical music versus Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. My own Holiday is Chanukah, which fell so early this year that it is already come and gone. I may well be blinded by my awareness of the contradictions about Christmas that I fail to see the similarity with Chanukah. The musical analogy is missing and the commercial aspect is perhaps more muted, although the serious observers offer gifts on every one of the eight days. But the gap… Read More
Continue ReadingNobelist Mario Vargas Llosa Gets It Right
I saw this short statement by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is in Stockholm awaiting the award of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Vargas Llosa, criticized “today’s fast-paced information society, saying it limits peoples’ depth of thinking and is a major problem for culture,” singling out the the entertainment industry for producing what he called a culture of “banalization, frivolization, and superficiality.” “I think the audiovisual revolution, which is fantastic from a technological point of view, has introduced the idea that the main goal of culture is entertainment.” “Of course, culture is also entertainment, but if it is only entertainment, the… Read More
Continue ReadingNarcissism and Normal Behavior
The NYTimes recently carried an article about the debate about leaving or omitting narcissism in the forthcoming, updated version of the American Psychiatric Association’s influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM sets forth the authoritative criteria used by medical professionals to diagnose and treat mental disorders. Narcissism, the article points out, falls into the class of “so-called personality disorders.” People with this characteristic behavior are “severely” disabled. Narcissism was always a natural. Its technical definition describes a devastatingly vulnerable person, compensating for a deeply imprinted inadequacy with a desperate need for admiration, and a grandiose self-image. “When… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Magic in Smallness
I think the picture has it backwards. Fritz Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful has much to offer still 37 years after it was published. Perhaps the most persistent remnant is the concept of appropriate technology, developing and using tools fitted to the local culture. His concerns were mostly about the importing, then and now, of technology willy-nilly to the developing world without regard to how it would be used in practice as opposed to the designers’ theory, and how it might negatively impact local cultural structure. He was one of the first to point to the weaknesses of GDP as an… Read More
Continue ReadingLeaked Cables and Sustainability
Hypocrisy, denial, trust, truth, and candor (sincerity) are words that come to mind while reading the latest news about the zillion leaked US State Department cables. Relationships among sovereign states, like those between friends and relations, require trust most of all. Candor helps to establish trust, but may be distorted on occasions where the truth would inflict unnecessary pain. Hypocrisy ultimately leads to loss of trust when actions belie the words spoken and claims made about them. In the absence of the last three in the list, relationships lose or never find a consensual basis for action, and can only… Read More
Continue ReadingTurkey Day
I am away for the long Thanksgiving weekend visiting my daughter and family in Northern Virginia. This Holiday has long since lost its meaning of gratitude for the plenitude of the Earth. The major event, the family dinner, is an occasion to prepare and eat enough to last through the whole four-day weekend. But even that has been replaced as the peak experience by Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year when people gather in throngs well before the stores open. Some as early as midnight. Last year, if I remember correctly, the crush of the crowd to… Read More
Continue ReadingI’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore!
This now famous line from “Network” was uttered by Howard Beale, the embittered newscaster. It also seems to have been in the background of people’s explanations for the choices made in this past election. Or perhaps, it was only a variation like, I’m as mad as hell at you, and I’m not going to take you anymore! It’s much, much easier to take out one’s frustration in these troubled times on somebody than to spend the time to locate where the “this” in Beale’s cry really lies. It’s never quite clear in the movie whether Beale’s use of “mad” refers… Read More
Continue ReadingMore is Not Necessarily Better
My colleagues in the sustainable consumption network sent me the abstract below of a recent academic article about choice. It provides further evidence of what academic psychologist Barry Schwartz has been saying for quite some time. I’ve added a TED video of his to the end of this post. Schwartz’s argument is simple, but elegant. The idea of freedom as proportional to the number of available choices stops working when that number gets large. At some point more choice become pathologic, and the actor, rather than being able to enjoy more freedom, comes under what Schwartz calls the tyranny of… Read More
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